 Good evening. Today, I want to talk about the thing. No, not the John Carpenter film. The thing is a short fan-made campaign for Half-Life 2 consisting of four levels. What makes it special, however, is that it was released before Half-Life 2 itself. Built from the early version of the game that leaked online in 2003, this campaign is amateur, but impressive from a technical standpoint. The degree to which its combat and art design resembles the retail version of Half-Life 2 puts in a perspective just how devastating the league was. To lay out the timeline of events, the leak itself occurred on October 2nd, 2003. The thing was published online 11 months later on the Russian forum Half-Life Inside in September of 2004. Half-Life 2 officially released two months after that on November 16th, 2004. So yeah, this is a fan-made Half-Life 2 campaign that was released a whole two months before the game itself. It's impressive that the creator, who's credited only as Donald, was able to build a campaign with a decent gameplay loop, all things considered. There were zero officially sanctioned tools or developer resources available for the Source Engine at the time. Only buggy leaked dev software that very few people really understood how to use. I imagine Donald must have had experience with Half-Life 1 mapping prior to creating the thing. It's the only way I can imagine them being able to cobble this together so quickly. And it would also explain how Half-Life 1-esque the campaign is. We'll get into that later though. To play the thing, I used the fan-made Half-Life 2 beta mega build from 2018 that comes prepackaged with the campaign. This allowed me to enjoy it on a more stable platform that crashes a lot less. And if you're planning to give this a crack yourself, I'd highly recommend you do the same. But without further ado, let's have a look at what the thing has to offer. We open in some kind of industrial area with a gray fog that builds a surprisingly unique atmosphere. This area we're in really doesn't make much sense or resemble any real-world structures, but it's hard to knock it for that. If anything, it kind of adds to the map's almost dream-like appeal. The player starts with no weapons except a crowbar on the ground, and it's pretty clear they're supposed to head directly into this big building. If you choose to explore the environment a little bit more though, you'll notice loads of physics props, and eventually you'll run into some zombies, but it's a waste of effort to kill them. Once you head into the facility, you'll run into some headcrabs, the USP match pistol, and a suit battery. It's interesting. The suit battery sports some kind of weird, early Half-Life 1-esque design, and the headcrabs have blood splats on them, but the pistol is nearly identical to what we got in the final game. As you look through this map, you'll notice a lot of duplicate dead bodies of Odell, the early version of Odessa, scattered about. This is pure guesswork, but I think the creator used this model in particular because it kind of looks like a uniform. Maybe the orange jumpsuits are supposed to be facility personnel that worked here prior to the zombie infestation, just like the scientists in Half-Life 1. Or maybe it was just laziness. Either way, I can't pretend it's not a little weird to see so many of the same bodies strewn about. As you make your way further into the facility, you'll start running into ant lines and combine soldiers. It's a lot like Nova Prospect. Sometimes you'll catch these factions fighting each other, sort of like how you can see Xen aliens fighting each other in the original game. It's not made very clear, but what you're supposed to do in this building is locate and press these three buttons, which allow you to leave the facility. However, you're not out of the woods yet. After making their escape, the player will find themselves in an open forest. The first thing you're faced with is this structure. If you enter and climb up to the second store, you'll get your hands on the combine sniper rifle that was cut from the final game. It sucks, and it takes two hits to kill anything with it, but it's still fun to use just for its novelty. This window also gives you a chance to check out your surroundings. The forest is blocky and primitive, with no use of displacements at all. I won't lie, it looks kind of bad and its design is honestly way too open, but I still found it pretty charming, especially with this area's nice ambient soundtrack. Unfortunately, it's copyrighted material so I can't play it, but take my word that it's very calming. Honestly, I'd love to see someone reimagine this area using the white forest assets from Half-Life 2 Episode 2. I can see it being a pretty nice fit. Anywho, the forest is patrolled by a bunch of soldiers who are just sprawled around the field and inside various structures. There's these two sleeping quarters, a water tower, some outhouses, and even an abandoned home reminiscent of the ones you come across in the coastal segment of Half-Life 2. The sleeping quarters are really simple set pieces, but they're pretty fun nonetheless. It's interesting to see how the creator made rudimentary use of Half-Life 2's physics engine on the doors. Although it's a bit jank, this area is actually a decent example of a non-linear combat encounter where the player gets the choice to handle it however they'd like. Playing on hard meant that I didn't have much health by this point, so I had incentive to loop these structures for supplies. But if you wanted to, you could just rush to the end, break out the buggy to run over all these soldiers in the field, or even pick them all off one by one with a sniper if you really felt like it. All this really needed in order to progress though is for you to go into the house at the end, make your way to the second floor, and then press this button to open a gate. From here, we move on to the next area. Entering back into a separate part of the facility, you're meant with this grandiose room that kind of reminded me of the Resident and Evil series. After pressing a button on the wall next to the entrance, doors start sliding open, rock music starts playing, and you're launched into a battle against ant lions, all types of zombies, stalkers, and finally an ant lion guard, which I believe is the thing that the title of the campaign is alluding to. I can't lie, in spite of how jank and simple it is, this bit still gave me a nice adrenaline rush and I found it pretty fun. While playing, I noticed that right clicking lets you toggle laser guidance on the rocket launcher like you can in Half-Life 1, and I always wondered why that was absent from Half-Life 2. I also noticed that the ant lion guard seems to be made of metal, and it also seemed like I was only doing any real damage when I was using the rocket launcher. I can't say this was certainty, but I think the ant lion guard in this is impervious to anything other than explosive damage. Not a worry, however, as this room just so happens to have a stash of a dozen or so rocket launchers laying around for you. After you defeat the thing, the doors at the end of the room open, and you step out into fresh air once again. You're meant with a platoon of rebels guarding a helicopter, ready to help you escape via air. As you approach, the screen fades and the level ends. You can just kill the fuckers if you really want to though. So, to wrap things up, the thing is a relic of the early Half-Life community that serves as a testament to its loyalty, craftiness and persistence. Is it perfect? No, far from it, but given the circumstances of its creation, I'd call it pretty damn impressive. If you've got 20 minutes to spare, I'd highly recommend checking it out yourself sometime, and if there's any talented mappers in the audience, it'd be really cool to see someone reimagine this mod, bring it up to modern standards of Half-Life 2 mapping. Anyway, that's all I've got for now. Thanks for watching, join my Discord server, it's really active, and have a good day. Oh, I also have a Patreon, but I mean, I try not to show that too much.